Monday’s hearing in the Trenta case took place without any witnesses being heard and in the absence of Janez Janša. Specialised prosecutor Luka Moljk was also absent. The court was due to hear again the former bankruptcy trustee of the company Imos, Branka Remškar, who did not appear in court.
This time, the lawyers of the accused trio presented evidence of the baselessness of the indictment, while a few more witnesses – who, according to our information, cannot influence the Kafkaesque trial itself all that much – are expected to be heard at the next main hearing on the 10th of March.
The indictment is based on completely erroneous assumptions
Lawyer Gorazd Fišer, the defence lawyer of the first defendant, Branko Kastelic, presented evidence of the rise in real estate prices between 2003 and 2008, i.e. at the time when the prosecution believes the disputed deals in the Trenta case took place. According to a report by the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia (GURS), prices rose by an average of 80 percent during this period. The biggest jumps in property values were recorded in the tourist destinations of the Gorenjska region, followed by the Coast and Ljubljana. This was particularly visible in the prices of apartments. However, the estimated values of these properties, according to the Surveying and Mapping Authority records, did not correspond to the real price of the properties on the market, as the indictment relies on the fact that the company Imos bought the former Janša estate in Trenta, i.e. Tonder’s homestead with the associated land with a total area of 15 thousand square metres, at a much higher price than the Surveying and Mapping Authority’s estimate. A review of Imos’s real estate transactions shows that during this period, both purchases and sales of real estate took place at prices with an average price multiplier of 8,15 compared to the Surveying and Mapping Authority recorded value. Thus, even land with a purchase price of, say, 100 euros per square metre in 2003 was sold a few years later for two to five times that price. However, Imos’s business philosophy at the time, as evidenced by the statements of the then-Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the company, Janez Zorman, was that Imos should also buy land on a stock basis and should act expansively, especially through acquisitions of land in attractive locations.
Fišer also highlighted the decision of the Court of Audit of the Republic of Slovenia, which had warned the Agricultural Land Fund of uneconomic practices, as agricultural land was uniformly valued – including those adjacent to building land. This required the Fund to lay down rules for the valuation of land prices in its rules of procedure, but the appraisers from the Sicgras company, who were asked to estimate the value of the property in question, did not take this into account in their methodology for the valuation of the former Janša estate. In addition, many plots of land that were priced at one to two euros per square metre in 2003 were priced at around 30 euros per square metre in 2019.
Lawyer Martina Žaucer Hrovatin, who is defending the accused Klemen Gantar, recalled an article on the Siol web portal about the sale of Janša’s former estate at an auction during the bankruptcy of Imos. As is known, the estate was sold for around 127 thousand euros, with the bankruptcy trustee of Imos, Branka Remškar, expressing her delight at the amount.
Behind the indictment, the retired prosecutor who confiscated the Mladina magazine in 1987
Given the evidence presented, there is no doubt that the indictment is, therefore, built on very shaky foundations and can only convince those who really hate Janez Janša. Additionally, the prosecution’s argumentation is extremely weak in the face of all the facts presented.
It is worth recalling that one of the “godfathers from behind the scenes” of this indictment is the retired prosecutor Hinko Jenull, father of the notorious left-wing activist Jaša Jenull. According to information from the internet, “papa Jenull” was the State Secretary at the Ministry of Justice in the last Drnovšek and also Rop government (between 2000 and 2003), which was headed at the time by Ivan Bizjak, known as the Minister of the Interior from the Depala vas construct, in which he played a rather infamous role. As is well known, Jenull, born in 1952, graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1976 and, in the 1980s, was an investigating judge at the Ljubljana Basic Court. He was also the Secretary of the Supreme Court of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and then Head of the Ljubljana Basic Court Unit. In 1987, he even had one of the issues of the magazine Mladina confiscated before it had even been printed and sent for sale, because he, as a judge, upheld the decision of the prosecutor who had issued the confiscation order.
In May 2022, Bernard Nežmah, in his column in Mladina, described it as follows: “In 1987, in one of the confiscations of Mladina, the prosecutor was particularly hasty and confiscated it before it was even bound and had a cover. Our defender, Matevž Krivic, disputed that they had confiscated something that was not yet a newspaper, that this was illegal, and he poked the party judiciary with the memory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where the publisher, Ciril Vidmar, was able to publish Kardelj’s book The Slovenian National Question, because the royal prosecutor had followed the law, i.e. he had waited for his copy to be delivered to him, and then he read and banned it, and in the meantime, the publisher has already sent the lion’s share of the print run to readers. But Judge Hinko Jenull, now a prosecutor, was deaf to the literal understanding of the law and upheld the confiscation.”
After Slovenia gained its independence, Hinko Jenull was a lawyer for almost a decade, but after an episode in the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia (Liberalna demokracija Slovenije – LDS) government, he was promoted to the post of public prosecutor. In 2004 – after the previous Prosecutor-General, Zdenka Cerar, had left the year before to join Rop’s government as Bizjak’s deputy – he applied for the post of Prosecutor-General. At that time, Elizabeta Gyoerkoes and Vlasta Nussdorfer also applied, but later withdrew, leaving only Jenull in the running. Later, Franc Mazi also withdrew, and in 2005, Barbara Brezigar was appointed to the post. Well, the interesting thing here is that the call for a new Attorney-General was opened during the Rop government, and it was the Rop government that enabled Jenull to run.
As is also written in the online report, Jenull was the Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office since 2003 and was the Head of the Criminal Division of the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office from 2005 to 2009. He was then reassigned to the Ministry of Justice during the Pahor government to perform more complex professional tasks, mainly in the field of legislative procedures, and was involved in the drafting of a large number of regulations in the field of justice. He was made a Councillor in 2013 and awarded the Special Medal for Merit in 2022. And he is celebrated as a great expert, even though he was among the political human rights violators in the 1980s. The current editorial team of the Mladina magazine defends him, just as it defends his son.
However, even during the last Janša government (2021), Hinko Jenull is said to have informed Gregor Golobič that another indictment would come to light against the then-Prime Minister, Janez Janša. Apparently, it was the one filed by Boštjan Valenčič, which is now the basis for the current Kafkaesque trial in Celje.
Gašper Blažič
